Twist vs. Email: The More Organized Way to Work

Twist makes your team communication calmer, more organized, and more productive.

Though we still use it almost every day, email is an outdated tool for teamwork. It was the backbone of the early internet, but as a tool for collaboration, it’s a flawed, fragmented method of communication that most teams can’t stand. We’re not the first people to say it and we won’t be the last.

We created Twist because we know that teams can do better work, with better tools.

Here’s a glimpse into the ways Twist is better than email. We’ll also introduce you to a calmer, more organized and more productive way of working with your team.

Organized, easy-to-find conversations

An email inbox is unorganized. Internal work emails get mixed in with messages from external clients, correspondence from your parents and all those newsletters you never actually subscribed to.

Email chains easily become long and difficult to read, and can splinter off into multiple chains, leaving key people out of the discussion. If you want to add someone to the conversation, you need to forward an entire mess of back-and-forth messages and attachments (and hope that they arrive). It feels archaic because, well, it is.

In Twist, conversations are organized into threads. When you want to loop someone in, you simply tag them and they can catch up on the entire conversation in its full context. That’s it. And since Twist’s threads are public, you can easily browse conversations you’re interested in and follow up on conversations that teammates had in the past.

Plus, everything’s organized in a simple, easy to use layout. Try and compare this with email– you literally have to read them backwards. Endless Gmail threads should not be the future of work.

Endless Gmail threads vs. Twist

A central source of team knowledge

Email happens in closed loops. Information stays locked in people’s inboxes, and when someone goes on vacation or leaves your team, progress grinds to a halt. Plus, your email inbox is just one of many places where your team communicates.

With Twist, all of your team's discussions are organized and accessible in one single place. Everyone sees the same version of the story– public threads are the default. In Twist, you don't have to go around asking your coworkers where things are, because it’s all already there. You can easily get back to ideas from a day, a week, or even a year ago.

Of course, you can keep things private when necessary, but otherwise, the rest of your team communication is accessible for everyone. Newcomers get up to speed faster, teams are able to recover less painfully from departures, and your employees can better absorb the information that they need so that they can do better work.

Make progress in your actual work, not on your inbox

An email inbox is essentially just another list to manage. You have to continually prune it before it’s out of control, like a weed. Inbox clutter is overwhelming and it keeps you from doing your actual job.

Twist makes you and your team more productive by letting you focus on the work you actually want and need to do, instead of managing endless emails. At Doist, we don’t use email for internal communications at all– this means that we don’t have a running list of 100 unread messages (half of which is usually junk mail) to distract us.

On top of that, Twist gives your team the space to get deep work done by allowing you to snooze all notifications. You can work on your projects with the peace of mind that you won’t receive any unwanted notifications– and everyone else in Twist will know the same.

The workplace of the future and the tools to succeed in it are here. We believe that you’ll be able to collaborate for a better future with Twist.

TLDR: What can I do with Twist?

Easily follow conversations from start to finish and invite the right people to join in them.

Grow a centralized, searchable source of team knowledge that builds itself.

Focus on the work you actually want and need to do without worrying about missing something important.

We hope this helps you see the potential for a new way of work, and if you’re done with email for teamwork, give us a shout at feedback@twistapp.com. Have a great day!